Software Architect

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RESTful Texas Holdem Game

Working with a few very talented designers and developers in Seattle we were given the task of building a Flash-based Texas Holdem game for a competition. The concept was simple: players log in to play with fake money, the contest runs for a few weeks and the player with the highest number of chips wins a trip to Vegas. Holdem has been done in Flash a hundred times or more but this app had a key requirement: it must be cheatproof.

I designed a game logic engine in PHP which provided the Flash UI only enough data to let the user play. Shuffle logic and betting were handled server-side. User activity was compared against the server’s state management to verify that the cards in the hand were the cards the server chose.

Cool features:

Game logic secured by RESTful API over SSL

Flash UI with animations and sound effects

CodeIgniter PHP library for admin and scaffolding

Fuzzy betting logic which allowed the AI to play safe, moderate or risky bets